Archive for March, 2009

Mark Essen profile in New York magazine

March 31, 2009 | YTJ
Mark Essen (Photo: David Sherry for New York magazine)

Mark Essen (Photo: David Sherry for New York magazine)

This week’s New York magazine includes a one-page profile of twenty-two-year-old Mark Essen, the youngest artist included in “Younger Than Jesus.” The piece begins:

Upon graduating from Bard College last May, Mark Essen and his friends planned to buy cheap, damaged bikes on the Hudson Valley Craigslist, fix them up, then sell them in Manhattan. But they were too lazy to move them down to the city. Months later, after he was laid off from a tech job, Essen moved back in with his parents in Los Angeles, where he listened to a lot of Led Zeppelin. Since returning to New York, he’s been living out of his backpack, camped on friends’ couches.

Sounds like your typical slacker’s postcollegiate year, except for one thing: At 22, Essen is about to erupt on the art scene. He is the youngest of the 50 artists in the New Museum’s “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus,” the international exhibition exclusively showcasing the work of artists 33 and under.

To read the rest, click here.

Liz Glynn’s Building Rome In a Day featured in the New York Times

March 27, 2009 | YTJ

“Younger Than Jesus” artist Liz Glynn is included in Carol Vogel’s “Inside Art” column in today’s New York Times. The relevant passage begins:

It almost seems fitting that a show called “Younger Than Jesus,” the New Museum’s first triennial exhibition, featuring 50 artists who are (as the title implies) 33 or younger, would stage something called “Building Rome in a Day.” Besides filling the museum’s entire building, on the Bowery between Stanton and Rivington Streets on the Lower East Side, the show will include a 24-hour performance-turned-installation in which the Los Angeles artist Liz Glynn and her crew will actually try to construct a miniature version of the ancient capital in 24 hours.

To read the rest, click here and scroll down; Glynn is the second feature in the column. Keep an eye on this blog for photographs and other documentation of Glynn’s performance.

“YTJ” in the New York Times

March 18, 2009 | YTJ

On March 8, in a New York Times article titled “33 and Under, Please,” Carol Vogel discussed “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus”:

From left, exhibition curators Laura Hoptman, Massimiliano Gioni, and Lauren Cornell (photo: J.B. Reed for the New York Times)

From left, exhibition curators Laura Hoptman, Massimiliano Gioni, and Lauren Cornell (photo: J.B. Reed for the New York Times)

“This is different,” said Lisa Phillips, the New Museum’s director, in an interview at its two-year-old building on the Bowery. “It’s a really focused exhibition about a generation.”

Flippantly titled “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus,” the building-wide show, which runs from April 8 through June 14, will present an international sampling of artists 33 and under who were born and bred in the computer age.

“They constitute the largest demographic since the baby boomers,” said Massimiliano Gioni, director of special exhibitions at the New Museum, who organized the show with Laura Hoptman, the New Museum’s senior curator, and Lauren Cornell, the museum’s adjunct curator.

Mr. Gioni added: “Sociologists and marketing experts have already labeled this generation everything from the Millennials and Generation Y to iGeneration and Generation Me. In China 50 percent of the population is younger than 33. This generation of artists are the most important agents of change in this century.”

The exhibition’s curators also point out that turning points in recent art history have often involved young practitioners. Jasper Johns painted his first flag at 24; Matthew Barney had his first group show at 23; Eva Hesse burst into the scene when she was just 25.

While other ambitious survey exhibitions in New York tend to focus primarily on American artists, or those working in this country, “Younger Than Jesus” is international in scope.

To read the rest of the article, which contains interviews with participating artists Mark Essen, Kerstin Brätsch, and Josh Smith, click here.

“The Generational: Younger Than Jesus”

March 17, 2009 | YTJ

For “Younger Than Jesus,” the first edition of “The Generational,” the New Museum’s new signature triennial, fifty artists from twenty-five countries will be presented. The only exhibition of its kind in the United States, “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” will offer a rich, intricate, multidisciplinary exploration of the work being produced by a new generation of artists born after 1976. Known to demographers, marketers, sociologists, and pundits variously as the Millennials, Generation Y, iGeneration, and Generation Me, this age group has yet to be described in any way beyond their habits of consumption. “Younger Than Jesus” will begin to examine the visual culture this generation has created to date.

Inspired by the fact that some of the most influential and enduring gestures in art and history have been made by young people in the early stages of their lives, “Younger Than Jesus” will fill the entire New Museum’s building on the Bowery with approximately 145 works by artists all of whom are under the age of thirty-three years old. Hailing from countries including Algeria, China, Colombia, Germany, India, Lebanon, Poland, Turkey, and Venezuela, many are showing in a museum for the first time. The exhibition will span mediums and encompass painting, drawing, photography, film, animation, performance, installation, dance, Internet-based works, and video games. Major support for the exhibition has been provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation.

Consistent with the New Museum’s thirty-year mission to present new art and new ideas, “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” will be the first major international museum exhibition devoted exclusively to the generation born around 1980, tapping into the different perspectives, shared preoccupations, and experiences of a constituency that is shaping the contemporary art discourse and prescribing the future of global culture. In the United States, this demographic group is the largest generation to emerge since the Baby Boomers, while in India half the population is less than twenty-five years old; the sheer size of this generation ensures its worldwide influence. By bringing together a wide variety of artists and contextualizing their different approaches, “Younger Than Jesus” will capture the signals of an imminent change, identify stylistic trends that are emerging among a diverse group of creators, and provide the general public with a first in-depth look at how the next generation conceives of our world. Revealing new languages and attitudes, the exhibition will comprise a portrait of the agents of change at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The exhibition is organized by Lauren Cornell, Director of Rhizome and New Museum Adjunct Curator; Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions; and Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator.

“The New Museum has always been a platform for the new,” comments Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director. “We have given important early exposure to artists at the beginning of their careers, from Keith Haring to Adrian Piper, and Ana Mendieta to Jeff Koons—artists who subsequently changed the course of art. ‘Younger Than Jesus’ continues the New Museum’s tradition and mission of showing the art of tomorrow today.”

“The artists in ‘Younger Than Jesus’ reflect a preoccupation with our future, but also with history and tradition: Rather than foreswearing their parents, they seem interested in imagining new communities and alternative families,” says Massimiliano Gioni. “Their tactics range from role-playing to recycling, from identity tourism to technological archeology, from an hysterical form of realism to an intimate, micro-emotional art.”

According to Lauren Cornell, “The exhibition presents glimpses of a generation that is incredibly diverse, with artists moving seamlessly across mediums. Instead of radically breaking from the past, these artists draw from a myriad of influences across historical movements and geographies to highlight the intergenerational dynamics that drive contemporary art.”

“During World War II, both Pablo Picasso and Giorgio Morandi were both painting still lifes,” explains Laura Hoptman. “Two artists, belonging to the same generation, were imagining two absolutely different realities emerging from a chaos that encompassed the entire world. We hope that ‘Younger Than Jesus’ will offer a look at our world as reflected through the work of many artists belonging to the same time and yet representing entirely different perspectives on its problems and its beauties.”

Informants Worldwide
Artists were selected for “Younger Than Jesus” through an open curatorial model that is participatory, and inspired by the networking proclivities of the generation represented in the show. Initial research for the exhibition was conducted through an international network of correspondents and an information-sharing group of more than 150 curators, writers, teachers, artists, critics, and bloggers worldwide, who were asked to recommend artists for the exhibition. This methodology was intended to expand the curatorial process and challenge the traditional “single-source” method of creating an exhibition. Through this process, more than 500 artists were recommended and researched.

Publications
Biographical information and images from the over 500 artists who were submitted for consideration for the exhibition by the global network of informants will be included in the publication Younger Than Jesus: The Artist Directory, co-published by the New Museum and Phaidon. The publication will serve as an informal census of the artists from this generation, and will expand the exhibition by adding an additional platform.

The exhibition catalogue, co-published by the New Museum and Steidl, will include reproductions of the work of the fifty artists chosen for the exhibition, as well as original essays by the exhibition curators and an anthology of articles by a diverse group of writers including philosophers, sociologists, journalists, activists, and marketing and technology experts. It is intended to compose a complex picture of the art and preoccupations that animate the work of this emerging generation.

Live Archive
The New Museum’s fifth-floor Museum as Hub space will serve as the live archive of “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus.” Organized by freelance critic Brian Sholis and the New Museum’s Rya Conrad-Bradshaw, the space will serve as a research platform, discussion venue, and repository of international periodicals, films, and music created by or documenting this generation. Materials will be gathered from diverse sources: Sholis’s conversations and interviews with the exhibition’s artists; contemporary publications and zines selected by international correspondents; and texts by philosophers, sociologists, journalists, marketing, and technology experts about this generation. Regular lunchtime presentations will address the idea of generational shifts and the specific nature of this generation and its influences.